What Makes Good Social Media Content?

Social media is by nature a visual medium and most platforms have been created on the basis of sharing images and video. They’re packaged in handy mobile apps that we carry everywhere with us on our mobiles and tablets, and we can quickly and easily take a photo or record a video and upload it to our friends and followers.

Twitter (and LinkedIn because of its origins as a business network) is probably the exception to that as it started as an online text messaging platform, but now, like other social media platforms, it includes short video and image content too. And in fact, photos on Twitter get 150% more retweets and 82% of users watch video on Twitter. See our article: Which Social Media Platform? The Top Three.

As a rule of thumb a photo or video makes the best content. This is purely because our brains can process visuals 60,000 times faster than words, and in a world where we’re always on the go and accessing social media on our mobile devices while we’re out and about, we’re instantly drawn to something we can understand in a glance.

An image is also more likely to catch people’s attention and evoke an emotional response (think of all those cute cat pics), and is more likely to be remembered. So if you’re doing it right, it’s a great way to get your brand noticed and recognised.

Things to remember:

Be consistent

Always include your branding and try and create a look with colours and fonts that mean that people will recognise and remember.

Be interesting

Try and vary the type, style and length of the content you post. Facebook for example includes lots of different publishing tools, so make use of them and try a poll, event or offer, or even a Facebook Live video.

Be relevant

Don’t just post for the sake of posting

Keep it simple

If you’re just starting out and are not used to writing, stick to a STAR format (Situation, Task, Action, Result) and try and tell a story (stories sell, facts tell).

Engage

Your aim is to get people to interact with you so include questions, quizzes, competitions, challenges, opportunities to share photos, info, opinions, and encourage user-generated content. And remember that engagement goes both ways – you need to interact, like and share too!

Create a personality for your company

Are you fun, quirky, formal, professional?

But remember to keep personal and professional separate

It may be that you are your brand, in which case, there may be some blurring between personal and professional, but in general your company’s brand, personality and culture needs to be separate and professional.

Make sure you’re in the right place

You need to know who you’re targeting and why, and where you can find them.

Plan ahead

As with any business activity, you need to plan in time to create and post your content and it’s a good idea to think ahead about what you’ve got coming up that you could share

The good news is that all the major platforms have great data and analytics built in, so you can try things out and see what works and what doesn’t.

On social media, your content and engagement levels are paramount to gaining the noise and raised profile that you’re seeking – so take expert help with planning your content to ensure you’re hitting the mark and being consistent with your messages.

Straight talking advice on Social Media Content from Yorkshire Powerhouse

Have you any questions?

Here at Yorkshire Powerhouse, we’re happy to help as much as possible – is there anything else we can do to help you, do you have any further questions or can we help introduce you to an expert – please let us know: